Oracle – for when it was like that when you got there

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After my recent post about escaping quotes in SQL scripts, I was surprised and delighted to receive a mail from Alexander Kornbrust, CEO of Red Database Security.
In it, he said he’d read the post and pointed out that the code therin was vulnerable to SQL-Injection.
I was fortunate enough to work with Alex, before he went off to become famous, so I know that he’s a bona fide expert in all things Oracle, especially security. Even so, I was initially puzzled by his assertion.
After all, the code I’d posted was an example where the code is held in a script and NOT in the database so wouldn’t be vulnerable to being executed by someone who’d hacked into the database itself. After all, SQL Injection happens interactively doesn’t it ? The hacker needs to be probing for weaknesses via a web front-end or similar. Don’t they have to be physically typing stuff in somewhere for this to work ? Er….apparently not.
Having asked around a number of Oracle developers, this would seem to be a widely held misconception. In terms of SQL Injection attacks, we’re all familiar with the classic HTML login form which POSTS to some mid-tier script or program which in turn, simply concatenates the username and password strings supplied by the user into a query then fires it off unthinkingly at the database. But how can you be attacked when the attacker isn’t even around at the time ? Continue reading →